


Clinically Significant Distress

by shewho



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: A Good Dose of Mandated Therapy, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coping Mechanisms, Episode: s02e19 Stalker, Established Relationship, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Stalker, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, Unwieldy Sentence Lengths, compulsive behaviors, did i mention the trauma?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-27 05:56:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21113801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: He’s almost out of mandated psych sessions, and new locks and hardware are cheaper than out-of-pocket counseling that he’d probably bail on anyways. Plus, Nick’s a man of the new millennium; he can use the goddamn internet.The internet, which informs him at three o’clock in the afternoon (the graveyard equivalent of two A.M.) that other people are out there wondering the same thing:does ptsd go away?does ptsd ever go away?how long do ptsd symptoms last?will ptsd nightmares go away eventually?can ptsd be cured?(The answers aren’t exactly heartening.)





	Clinically Significant Distress

**Author's Note:**

> General warnings for discussions/depictions of: canonical past trauma, canonical violence, canonical threats of further violence, graphic nightmares/ flashbacks/ daydreams, near death experiences... 👍
> 
> Title comes from a line in the DSM diagnostic criterion for PTSD that just slaps.

The door isn’t locked.

No. No, the door _is_ locked; he checked it before he went to brush his teeth. Jiggled the handle and snapped the deadbolt open-closed open-closed open-closed, because twice wasn’t enough.

Didn’t he? 

He did. He _did_. He always does. It’s a part of his routine, maybe the most important part. The door’s definitely locked.

But there are so many windows. And the control panel on his security alarm _should_ light up orange and _beep-beep-beep_ if any of the locks disengage, but Nick knows how faulty these systems can be, how a loose wire or a smudge on the motion detector’s electronic eye can render them no better than a chain lock with half-inch anchor nails. How alarm systems can make you complacent. How complacency can get you killed.

Maybe he could roll over and sleep through the jaw-grinding tension some other time – probably not through force of will alone, but he still has some Vicodin kicking around his medicine cabinet, he’s almost sure of it, and that shit always knocks him back, makes him sluggish and lead-limbed and sleepy – but it’s not worth the risk today.

He needs to check the door.

He could die if he doesn’t check the door. _Greg_ could die if he doesn’t check the door. So he needs to check the door.

Greg, who’s not-quite snoring, but breathing audibly beside him, mouth open slightly and eyes darting beneath closed lids. The steady rise and fall of his bare chest is a sight that soothes Nick, if for no other reason than it proves that Greg’s here and safe and hasn’t had his head shot off by a crazy-jealous-possessive cable installer.

It’s only Greg’s fourth sleepover in the new house, partly because in the beginning Nick wouldn’t let him stay over until the alarm system was fully wired up and running, and partly because Greg’s apartment was a place they had slept together Before, and nothing bad had happened there, which meant it was safe. Safer maybe than Nick’s new place, even with the new locks and the new alarm codes and the purposeful lack of crawlspaces. 

(He’d laughed so hard he nearly cried when the realtor told him that the unit really lacked peripheral storage with a disappointed look on her face, verging over the line into hysterical when she told him that _“what you see is what you’ve got: there aren’t any basements or attics, unfortunately”, _as if he ever wants to set foot in an attic as long as he lives.)

If he wants to keep on living, he needs to check the fucking door.

Nick rolls over, careful not to pull the sheets with him, and slides out of bed. His gun – relocated from his foyer to the second drawer of his night table – is waiting right where he left it when he went to sleep yesterday, and he hefts it singlehandedly, lets the weight settle cool and familiar in his palm. He leaves his bedroom door open just wide enough to slip through, then creeps down the hall, eyes adjusting to the dim as he goes.

Sticking close to the meticulously painted baseboards so as not to let the floors creak, he stalks through his tucked-in house on the balls of his socked feet, off-duty weapon in hand.

All the day-night noises that should be there are accounted for. Ice-maker. Air conditioner. The refrigerator hum that makes him weirdly nostalgic for Dallas in June and the endless high-frequency buzz of cicadas. Springer spaniel three doors down, excited for her fourth-grader to get off the bus. Light afternoon traffic on the street outside. Windchimes on the Richland’s porch.

And no fucking footsteps in his non-existent attic. 

He works his way methodically through the house, the rhythmic motion soothing as he skims his fingertips along the walls, checking his position as he goes. It’s the same circuit he’s been doing every day since he moved in, so the routine is well-practiced and doesn’t take him long.

Still, the gut-dropping panic doesn’t subside until Nick’s checked every window, made sure the goddamn fucking door was indeed locked, run his fingers over the edge of every cabinet, and poked his gun-hand-head into every closet. Only then does he dare return to the sanctum, like a cat burglar in reverse.

He lays his gun back into the open case in the nightstand, startles hard when Greg rolls over to face him and asks, “All good?”, his voice impossibly loud in the blackout-curtained cave of Nick’s bedroom.

“Jesus _fuck_,” he mutters, sliding the drawer shut – and how much of a fucking cliché is he, keeping guns in his bedside table? – with the barely-there _clunk_ of wood on wood. “Thought you were asleep, Greggo.”

“I was,” Greg says with a yawn that belies his statement. “But you’re awake, so I’m awake.”

The shame that bolts through Nick nearly takes his breath away, a hard blow right to his sternum as he climbs back into bed because, “Sorry my paranoia’s keepin’ you up at all hours, too. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“A little paranoia’s good for you,” Greg mumbles without opening his eyes. “It probably saved your life. Nobody in their right mind would blame you for being kinda high strung right now.” 

(Nick’s well past _‘a little paranoia’_ these days; has, in fact, met the diagnostic criteria well before the six-month delayed-onset marker. Only Greg would equate literal, actual, clinical PTSD with being _‘kinda high strung’_, and Nick loves him all the more for it.)

“Still,” he says, folding his arms around his pillow and staring at the faint shadow of Greg’s lashes against his cheek. “It’s been, what, four months?” Nineteen weeks and two days, but who’s counting? Certainly not Nick. “I should be over it by now.” 

Shouldn’t he? He should. Probably. Definitely.

“It’s trauma, babe,” Greg says, still a little sleep-slurred, and Nick isn’t at all jealous-resentful-envious that Greg can sleep soundly without checking and rechecking the seals on his home. “Doesn’t really work on a set schedule. Just gotta roll with it.” 

_Roll with it_, as if the constant hypervigilance doesn’t disturb or delay his sleep for precious hours, set his teeth on edge, and make him feel like a legitimate fucking lunatic. Like he doesn’t dream of Crane peering through his ceiling, or worse – Crane dying in his walls, Crane’s decomposing body leaking through the vent slats, Crane clambering down from his unseen perch to loom over Nick’s bed and unmake him, slip into his skin and assume his identity.

Greg huffs a soft breath, then reaches out blindly, the warmth of his hand reassuring when it lands on the join between Nick’s neck and shoulder. “There you are,” he murmurs, sliding his palm up to settle against Nick’s nape, thumb tracing a careful line from his temple to the point of his jaw and back. “You’re thinking so loud,” he whispers, like he can turn down the incessant hum of Nick’s thoughts by modulating his own volume.

_“I’m sorry,”_ Nick doesn’t say. _“I can’t stop thinking about how he saw us; I know he did. Even if you weren’t on the tapes, he saw us. I know he saw you and me, and knew what you meant to me because he told me that Jane – that a girl I’d never even met – would’ve gotten between him and me ‘just like Greg’. Just like Greg. And I’m fucking certain he woulda killed you next if that wannabe-clairvoyant hadn’t bumbled in on him and collapsed the whole charade, all that talk about new and better crime scenes, the back of your skull blown apart and me having to tweeze it outta my carpets, label the baggies with ‘SKULL FRAG. – G. SANDERS; INV. OFFICER: NS’.”_

_“He wanted me to process your murder,” _Nick doesn’t say._ “He wanted to make you a 4-19 that I’d have to respond to, in my own home. And I just can’t stop thinking about him killing you while I slept, waking up with you dead next to me, rolling over and seeing your corpse, or worse: coming home one day with that stupid Thai takeout you like and watching him kill you right in front of me.”_

_“I can’t stop thinking about how I coulda got you killed, and that scares the shit outta me, Greggo.”_

“I’m sorry,” Nick sighs instead, suddenly just profoundly exhausted. “I know it’s annoying that I still have t’do all… this. I know I shouldn’t still need to do it after four fuckin’ months, but it just,” he shrugs, trying to encapsulate the fuckedupedness of the situation with a vague hand gesture. “I gotta do it. Y’know?”

_“It’s about keeping me safe,”_ he doesn’t add. _“But it’s just as much about keeping you safe.”_

“I know,” Greg reassures him, peering across the divide of pillows, dark eyes still bleary with sleep. “I get it. We live in this weird facet of the world where we get to eat dinner at nine in the morning and talk about other people’s semen more than should really be necessary and see deranged men and women do deranged things up close and way too personal. So it’s not annoying. It’s a little worrying that you still can’t sleep without doing a perimeter check, but it’s not annoying. If this is what you’ve gotta do to get some rest, then by all means.” Greg hesitates, teeth sawing at his lower lip before he asks, “You talk to the doctor about this stuff?”

The short answer is _‘parts of it, unfortunately’._

He’s almost out of mandated psych sessions (an allotted number which jumped _way_ up the day he got his diagnosis fourteen weeks ago), and new locks and hardware are cheaper than out-of-pocket counseling that he’d probably bail on anyways. Plus, Nick’s a man of the new millennium; he can use the goddamn internet. 

The internet, which informs him at three o’clock in the afternoon (the graveyard equivalent of two A.M.) that other people are out there wondering the same thing:_ does ptsd go away?_

_does ptsd ever go away?_

_how long do ptsd symptoms last?_

_will ptsd nightmares go away eventually?_

_can ptsd be treated without drugs?_

_can ptsd be cured without therapy?_

The answers come back in stark black type: **_NO_**

No, it won’t go away on its own. No, he needs to pick a course of therapy: drugs, or talk, or both. No, it won’t go away forever. There’s no cure, no remission, just a tenuous hold on normalcy that can rupture at any time if Nick happens to ‘re-experience his trauma’ before he’s able to ‘process’ and ‘incorporate’ it.

Whatever _that_ means.

His therapist loves to throw that kind of hyphenated nonsense at him, phrases like _trauma-related micro-flashbacks_ and _time-consuming compulsions_ and _ritualistic task-completions_ and _non-functional behaviors_.

Which is a saccharinely-professional way of saying, _“Nick fuckin’ climbs the walls trying to make sure his place is secure. Nick literally cannot fucking sleep without checking the locks, and then checking them twice, because Nick didn’t notice a man camping out in his rafters for a month, so Nick really shouldn’t be trusted to be particularly observant. Nick would be sleeping with his gun under his actual pillow if it weren’t for Greg, who would never put up with that level of crazy.”_

The doctor had been pissed as all hell when she’d read in his file about the Hendler case last year, and how he’d only done one session before being cleared by psych services, and how he’d failed to mention it during their first seven sessions. 

He’d been able to yessir his way out of return trips to the department headshrinker that first time – _yes, sir, I was afraid; no, sir, I am not afraid to use my service weapon in the field; yes, sir, Supervisor Grissom acted in compliance with procedure; no, sir, I haven’t really thought about it since_ – mostly because the counselor had been (still is) so overworked he could hardly remember his own name. 

The trauma specialist they’ve set him up with this time is a no-bullshit kind of woman who reminds him of his grandmother, except Hispanic and without the disastrous affinity for floral-patterned muumuus. (When he tells her this in the midst of his fourth session, she quirks an eyebrow at him and says sardonically, _“I’m flattered, Nick.” “You should be,”_ he’d replied. “_My grandmother was a terrifying woman.”)_

He tells her inane things to fill his weekly ninety minutes, like the fact that he knows a regular session is only forty-five and can’t she pretty-please let him know if she’s treating anybody else who’s as fucked up as he apparently is, whose workplace thinks they need to double down on his couch time (so to speak; the distinct lack of psychoanalytic couches in her office had been a genuine disappointment and he’d resigned himself to the oxblood leather armchair grudgingly) to reduce liability, just to sate his own personal curiosity; one blink for yes, two blinks for no?

He talks for eight agitated minutes about wandering the grocery store for half an hour looking for something he forgot before he even got there. How he needs to stop buying the bigger loaf of 21-grain bread because the last two have gone moldy before he gets to the heel. He informs her that Greg lovingly refers to the last piece of bread in the baggie as ‘the butt’, and also has a mason jar on top of his fridge full of the little plastic clippies used to tie the bag shut.

(He doesn’t tell her that he keeps _his_ bread clips in a tidy little pile next to the toaster until he has amassed a small handful to dump into Greg’s jar.)

He tells her about how he almost got a ticket last week for going seventy in a fifty-five zone. How he only got off with a warning when he pulled his creds out of the console, told the kid-officer at his window who couldn’t’ve been more than twenty-five that he was on his way to a scene, he’s real sorry, he’ll slow down.

(He doesn’t tell her how he saw-imagined-envisioned his twenty-four year-old self, all decked out in his old DPD uniform standing behind the kid, arms folded, ready to correct the kid on his approach, point out the minimum-three ways Nick could’ve shot him before he even reached the driver’s side door. He doesn’t tell her he thought about Nigel Crane’s arm reaching through his open window from the passenger’s seat and popping the kid twice through the forehead, then turning to Nick with a grin and cheering,_ “Looks like you won’t have to rush off to that scene after all, Nick; there’s a fresh one right here”. _He definitely doesn’t tell her that he threw up in the weeds only a mile or so down the road.)

He tells her he isn’t sleeping great, but only when she asks him point-blank.

(He does not mention the panic-inducing graphic nightmares or how he wakes with a start every time he has one, breathing hard, heart hammering out of his chest like he’s fallen from some great height.)

All the same, she pegs him fast, notices his immediate discomfort when she applies the T-word to him. Sends him home with instructions to practice saying it in front of the mirror, which he refuses to do, but spends hours thinking about nonetheless.

He has experienced trauma. He is traumatized. The things that have happened to him were traumatic.

(In nineteen weeks, he’s said and heard variations of the word _‘trauma’_ so often that it doesn’t even sound like a real word anymore.)

Trauma, his therapist insists, isn’t something one just gets over. It’s something one gets _through_. Because trauma isn’t one thing that you can just put down beside your path and never have to set eyes on again. It’s way more complex than that.

Complex. Multifaceted. Complicated. False memories. Real memories. Sense memories. Rationalizations. Irrationalizations. All this and more jumbled up in the garbage disposal of his brain.

It’s normal, she says, to be suspicious. Anxious. To feel the skin-crawly edginess even after nineteen fucking weeks of Crane being held without bail while the DA works up a case for two murders and a fucking staggering number of ‘lesser’ charges. She says that coping takes many forms. She says that if keeping his gun closer at hand than he used to helps him sleep, then he should do it as long as he practices proper residential firearm safety. She tells him that he deserves to feel safe.

(He doesn’t tell her that the last time someone made him feel that unsafe in his own home, he was nine years old and didn’t yet own a gun.)

There is also the simple fact that therapy sucks, and Nick hates it, finds it invasive and exhausting and tantamount to being mentally strip-searched on a weekly basis. At least he’s finally down from two-a-weeks. The Monday-Thursday schedule they’d put him on for the first twelve weeks After nearly drove him batshit crazy (which his therapist has since assured him is different than regular crazy).

Still, as much as it sucks (and it _sucks _like a rip current at noon), he has to admit that it’s maybe working.

Because Nick’s not getting any _worse_, which is more than he could say for the first few days After – after his ceiling collapsed to reveal a homicidal stalker, after a man was killed in his living room, after he stood there with a gun held to his head for the second time in eighteen months, _damnit damnit damnit_ – when he’d lost all semblance of his regular sleep pattern and started to look exactly how he felt: chewed up, spat out, and tossed out a window by Crane.

Back then, the prospect of sleep had been equal parts elusive and terrifying, and not only because of the nightmares that woke him up every few hours shaking and sweating and tensed for a bullet to rip through his skull.

Nick spent the better part of a week stuck in the sort of feedback loop of dull-exhausted-sleeplessness and achy-nauseous sick-soreness that runs him down like a battery that refuses to hold a charge. The sort of cycle that can land you in the hospital with an IV in your arm if you aren’t careful, except he’d just gotten _out_ of the hospital and –

And he couldn’t go home to his friendly neighborhood crime scene because everything had been blown to shit in an astoundingly short time.

Four minutes and forty seconds between the time Crane dropped down from his ceiling and the time Brass’s guys had him cuffed and pinned on the rug in Nick’s living room.

Four minutes and forty seconds where Nick stared down the barrel of his own gun and thought, _Shit._

“Yeah,” he says finally, in answer to Greg’s question. “She thinks I should start easin’ myself back, trusting that my security system’s working fine, just doing one or two laps around the house instead of four or five. Says that there’s stuff she can prescribe if the nightmares aren’t gettin’ any better.”

“Are they still that bad?” Greg asks, eyebrows climbing up his forehead rapidly. “The nightmares? You haven’t been – you’ve been sleeping so much more soundly these last couple weeks, I just assumed –”

Nick rolls his shoulders in an awkward sideways shrug. “They’re less frequent than they were. And they were never that _bad_,” he assures Greg with a half-smile. “Just kinda… disturbing. Real fucking gruesome stuff my unconscious brain cooks up for my viewing pleasure. Shouldn’t be a surprise, the shit we see on a daily basis. ‘S just worse when it’s in my head, and it’s me or you or somebody we know lyin’ on a slab, all slit open with their belly emptied out.”

“Well if it’s still bothering you, maybe you oughta let her know.”

“I dunno.” He wriggles further into the nest of sheets, adjusting the angle until his shoulder pops loudly in the stillness. (Greg makes a soft gagging noise in protest, like Nick knew he would, which was at least half the reason he did it in the first place.) “I don’t really love tellin’ her about this stuff. Makes me feel fuckin’ crazy.”

_“Hey.”_

Greg’s voice is firm, a reprimand. “You’re not crazy, and you’re not… _weak_, or _damaged_, or whatever other terrible thing I know your brain’s been busy telling you. You’re scared and you have every right to be. What happened to you was terrifying. So it makes _sense_ that you’re afraid. But – and I _cannot_ stress how entirely your fault it is that this phrase is about to willingly leave my lips, so I just hope you can recognize and accept that responsibility,” Greg says, closing his eyes like he’s in actual, physical pain. “But you’ve got more guts’n you could string on a fenceline, so I reckon you’ll be alright.” 

The last part is said with an atrocious attempt at Nick’s own accent and he smushes his face into his pillow and laughs at the admittedly-morbid but _hilarious_ image of Greg in elbow-length yellow dishwashing gloves, looping entrails along the west-facing fence of his parents’ property, all backlit by the sun.

“You’re right here. And I’m right here. And nothing bad is gonna happen to us in this fortress stronghold you call a house. Okay?”

Nick nods, knowing that Greg can feel it where he’s still got his hand pressed to the side of Nick’s face. 

“Nope, honey; nuh-uh,” Greg shakes his head, hair flattened against the annoyingly-firm pillow Nick keeps on hand for him because of Greg’s goddamn peculiar fixation regarding memory foam. “Gonna need to hear an answer on that one. Verbal confirmation, please.”

“Okay,” he says finally, like the word’s been punched out of him. “I really don’t mean to make you worry, G. I just… I sleep better makin’ sure it’s safe.”

“Stupid,” Greg says, all soft and easy fondness. “I always worry, but only ‘cause I care.”

For all the things he is, Nick’s not really a space buff. He knows a handful of constellations, though; enough to impress on a night-hiking star-gazing kind of date, at least. Greg, he discovered early on, has a grouping of freckles in the exact shape of Vulpecula looping under his arm and across his right pectoral. 

Now, Nick wants to trace the invisible dotted lines and form the celestial creature with his tongue, wants to kiss Greg until his mouth goes numb. He settles, instead, for turning his face to drop a kiss in the center of Greg’s palm, the kind of kiss that says _thank you_ and _how’d I get so lucky_ and _you’re just right for me_ and_ I love you so goddamn much_ without saying a word.

After all, nothing says _‘I love you and I’d do anything to keep you safe’_ quite like a gun in the night table does.

**Author's Note:**

> So, as you might've noticed, a lot of Nick's behaviors here are sort of a sly point towards trauma-congruent OCD symptoms, which co-occur with PTSD in an estimated 25+% of cases. Newsflash; PTSD isn't all nightmares and emotional numbness and exaggerated startle responses (though those are frequently reported symptoms and thus a big part of the collective PTSD narrative).
> 
> That said, there are definitely more nuanced and refined ways of discussing & describing trauma symptoms and manifestations of PTSD, but considering that this fic 1) takes place around July/August of 2002 and 2) centers around a character who is (canonically) virulently anti-therapy, a nuanced and refined depiction didn't really fit the bill. Also, let it be noted for the record that I 0% support the use of 'crazy' as a clinical term, but I feel like Nick would not have the same hesitation, hence its frequent use herein. If that offended, I apologize; it's a character choice, not my opinion.


End file.
